


nothing is whole and nothing is broken

by polyside



Series: drift compatible as fuck [3]
Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, F/F, M/M, Not Beta Read, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-20 22:49:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21289460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyside/pseuds/polyside
Summary: Being at the Academy with Laura and Jonah comprises some of the most fun and challenging experiences you’ve had in your entire life, and even if you weren’t sure in your bones that your best drift would be one of your siblings you’d just be happy they’re there with you anyway.
Relationships: Brian David Gilbert/Jonah Scott, Brian David Gilbert/Patrick Gill, Simone de Rochefort/Jenna Stoeber
Series: drift compatible as fuck [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535681
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	nothing is whole and nothing is broken

**Author's Note:**

> If I'm lucky this is the last one of these that will consume me so desperately that I spit it out in roughly a week. I struggled to start more with Brian than with Pat or Griffin but once I found his headspace I couldn't leave it and this is the result. As usual, please leave right away if you are or are close with anyone in the tags. Let me know in the comments how this one feels - I've done even less editing than normal but it feels right, for Brian.

You’ve wanted to be a pilot your whole life, holy god, there’s nothing else for you. It took years and Patrick never gave in but Laura did, she’s closer age-wise, you knew she would. You waited your entire life to head off to the Academy and the day you finally do, everything changes.

Everyone you meet at the Academy is awesome. Your mentor Simone is the coolest chick you ever met in your entire life, seriously Jonah, she’s both rad and hot how do you not love her? You think you’ll miss Simone a lot, and the way she alternately laughs, screams, and glares at you depending on just how insane the thing you just said was and how unwilling she is that day to let you get away with it. Simone is helped to mentor you by Griffin McElroy, part of the famous trio, and the equally stunning Clayton Ashley, renowned for waking up only a few weeks after destroying his mind solo piloting. Clayton isn’t as exuberant as Simone and Griffin but you like him the most of the three. He’s quiet and shy, yeah, and that means your fellow recruits don’t believe them when Simone and Griffin tell your class that he’s the best and smartest of the three of them, but you see it, and so you make sure Laura and Jonah do, too. And being at the Academy with Laura and Jonah comprises some of the most fun and challenging experiences you’ve had in your entire life, and even if you weren’t sure in your bones that your best drift would be one of your siblings you’d just be happy they’re there with you anyway.

Laura is your best friend and best girl - you’re definitely bisexual but you don’t, really, think you’ll find a lifelong romantic partner who identifies as a woman. Jonah’s amazing too, he says he never really wanted to be a ranger before you met but he’s lying, and if it was just you it wouldn’t be enough anyway. Being a pilot is so much more difficult than a few stolen kisses in dorm rooms and Jonah’s too smart and so are you to fall for that, so for all that he’s the wind to your sun, your partner in so many other ways, you can feel what’s missing and you know. Most pilots (not all, not the McElroy brothers but they’re famous for it and you’re just Brian) only have most true compatible drift partner at a time, who beats all the rest, and Jonah isn’t yours, Laura is, she’s your big sister and your other best friend and she hates that being your partner means she won’t find her man that way (she said this only once while very drunk but you’re _never_ going to let her forget it, what kind of little brother would you be) but you _fit_ and that’s what matters to your teachers.

That’s not to say you don’t test well with others, of course you do, you’re a get-along-with-able kind of guy with no major issues of childhood or identity and so you meld into other people easily, you’ve always had that skill and you’re not unaware of it, how could you be? You make friends with everyone, pilots, psychs, medics, recruits, staff, and they are all awesome, but you do most of your training with Laura and Jonah under the watchful eyes of Clayton and Simone and the entire McElroy family, and it works gloriously. You and Laura are too good together to linger at the Academy though, and so you get to say goodbye to most of your mentors and friends one crisp autumn morning, only Griffin and Justin away on a mission but Sydnee there in their place to see you off.

Life at the Dome is nothing like the Academy. You share housing with Laura (and Jonah when he’s there) and it’s cramped and there’s a sense of anxiety and tension that permeates the entire Dome that you never felt at the Academy (you can’t imagine Simone living like this, she’d snap). You have to get out as often as humanly possible and Laura clearly agrees because she’s right there by your side on every stupid reckless mission you volunteer for just to get a chance to be out under the sky. Years pass but you’ll never remember them distinctly, only the moments when something especially sharp happens to cut through the fog of dread that is life at the Dome. Funerals, mostly, and the parties that follow, always finding you hanging off Laura or Jonah or one of your visiting friends or fellow recruits, you’re not _stupid_, you know what _they_ say about you. You’re wild, reckless, willing to go on any run for the thrill of it and then a slut for anyone who will make you feel good for a night as long as your sister isn’t there to stop you, but in this world what really matters but what you feel from moment to moment, you could die any day and then what would you have to say for yourself but silence? It doesn’t hurt, it _doesn’t_, Laura, there’s no reason to stop because there’s nothing that would make you stop, everything is _fine_.

Laura’s the best parts of you. She goes to every party even if she’s tired, just to look after you and keep the bad guys at bay. At night when you wake up screaming she’s there, hand on your shoulder or fingers in your hair to _ground_ you, bring you back to the earth you live on instead of the stars that consume you. Laura won’t let anything defeat her and that’s why she’s so good, everything melts away when your sister protects you and that’s right, she says, that’s how it should be, she’s older and she _should_ be your shield. But you’re the one who chose the ranger’s life - you think Laura would have been happy somewhere else like you never would - and it hurts like a _bitch_ when the inevitable happens and it’s her instead of you, it wasn’t supposed to be that way but she shields you one last time in that moment, disconnects from your drift so violently you pass out with the sensation of her lips on your forehead and all of her love as the last thing you know.

You’re entirely numb for, you don’t know how long, you don’t know who on the mission caught your Jaeger and carried you back but you’re endlessly grateful to that team (you suspect it was Travis and Justin McElroy but neither of them ever say anything) because as much as you hurt you’re happy every day to not be dead, nobody will ever be able to convince you that you’d rather be dead than alone, that’s just ridiculous. Jonah comes to visit at the end and your last party is Laura’s; he’s there by your side the whole night, holding your hand and glaring at any boy or girl who looks at you with intent. Jonah thinks you’re too vulnerable and he’s right, but he still comes when you pull him by the wrist to your bed, still kisses back like maybe he shouldn’t but you realize when his teeth find your shoulder that _he_ _lost her too_. This is how you mourn, one last night with Jonah like this, the echo of your youth together in every touch, a memory of Laura just a room away that neither of you can shake and so you both stifle every sound with kisses like forgiveness. When you wake up the next morning Jo’s nowhere to be found, and you wash the tears from your face and then go to the commanders and ask to be sent literally anywhere else. Your sob is of relief when they send you back to the Academy.

When you arrive it’s Simone waiting for you, with Jonah looking sheepish on her right side and a girl you’ve never met before on her left. Simone rushes forward and hugs you before you can even start to speak, and you _feel_ a tension drop from your shoulders that you didn’t know you’d been holding. She introduces the other girl as Jenna, her partner, and the wicked grin and raised eyebrow tell you all you need to know about what kind of partners they are. Jenna hugs you too and it takes you by surprise, but it’s not unpleasant, you think maybe you like her already. Jonah’s all apologies for leaving you, guilt thick in his eyes, but you murmur your forgiveness into his neck, and everything is fixed already. The four of you walk together through the halls as Simone catches you up on the gossip before she stops, suddenly, in front of a pilot’s door and fakes nonchalance as she waves for you to drop your things. The anxiety ends up being unfounded, though, the single ranger’s apartment so different from both the one you shared with Jo and Laura in training and the one from the Dome that you could cry from the relief of it. They leave you to it, and when you sit on the bed and think about decorating you can see some positivity in your future, for once.

You spend a few months just getting used to life at the Academy as a pilot instead of a recruit. There are fewer wild parties than at the Dome, but more hanging out, more cramming into someone’s shared apartment or taking over tables in the mess to play games or share stories. Before you left you hadn’t really considered Simone and Clayton your friends (too much distance between you) but now they seem genuinely interested in getting to know you as a person in your own right, which is. Very cool. Simone is unsurprisingly the social center of the Academy pilots, always hosting game nights, parties that are chill instead of crazy, and just having people over for a good time. It’s at one of her parties that you first encounter Patrick Gill, who is quietly drinking a beer while destroying all challengers at Mario Kart. You watch him for a while and wonder who he is at first, but as soon as you get his name you find yourself a bit starstruck. You’ve heard the stories: Patrick Gill was one of the best pilots to ever fly, never meeting disaster in any run, taking to more than one Jaeger with ease, until he lost his partner on a mission right around the time you moved to the Dome. You’ve thought about the parallels in your lives once or twice since losing Laura but didn’t realize Patrick was living at the Academy, you didn’t know what happened to him, really. Another thing you didn’t know? Patrick Gill is _hot as hell_. You’ve seen the occasional photo but the man in the flesh in front of you now is tall and lanky, dark and mysterious, sexy, quiet, and 100% your type. You wish Laura was here so you could tell her everything, but instead all you can do is ask Simone to introduce you and she does, laughing, and you lose to Patrick but chatter away the whole time about nonsense but you think maybe you see a ghost of a smile on his face out of the corner of your eye.

The week after Simone’s New Year party (one of the crazier ones so far and you absolutely did not spend a decent length of time staring at brooding Patrick Gill leaned up against a wall and _zero_ time actually speaking with the man) you meet with Commander Long, at last. Adjustment is over and it’s time to get back on your feet. She’s heard of how talented you and Laura were and how you drifted with lots of people, before, and would you be willing to train with recruits again and see if any of them might be a match for you? You’re not _surprised_, per se, you knew there was a reason they sent you back to the Academy and that reason was going to benefit the effort so that isn’t the part that takes you aback. The part doing that is the request for you to go to training with recruits when you know, _you know_ that you know exactly what you’re doing. The Commander’s laugh has you realizing you hadn’t kept your confusion off your face, so she explains about drift conditions and compatibility testing, talks about some science you don’t understand regarding the training rooms, mentions that even Clayton goes sometimes and also you’ll be put with Pat Gill’s class and she raises an eyebrow but says nothing about it when you agree a little too quickly, only mumbling that she hopes you can cheer him up a little in a way that makes you think that maybe she didn’t fully mean for you to hear. She invites you to call her by bare name as she walks you out.

So you start going to classes with the insanely hot Pat Gill as your instructor, and take Tara’s words about cheering him up to heart. You’re surprised to find the average age of the recruits in your class a little closer to your own than the age you were as a recruit yourself, and Jenna explains sheepishly one night, draped backwards over Simone’s couch, that she was one of the latecomer girls too, brought in by a desire to meet Tara. You didn’t realize (how could you?) but Tara’s famous among women outside the effort for rising through the ranks and not letting her gender keep her down as a pilot. You think it’s fucking badass that more women want to be rangers thanks to Tara and tell Jenna so, but Clayton coughs suspiciously off to the side and Jenna also has to admit that the tragic stories of Clayton Ashley and Patrick Gill (and the fact that Griffin McElroy was still single, for a while, though that recently changed) _also_ brought in a lot of older women hoping to become their girls, not her of course. It reminds you so much of Laura that you do cry, a little, this time, when Simone curls up beside Jenna and they kiss so sweetly and Laura never got to have that. A bottle of wine later has Clayton admitting to not being really interested in anyone anymore (a side effect of what he put his brain through or just the true way he always was, he doesn’t know) but nobody responds when you ask about Pat with anything more than enigmatic smiles.

After a month or two you go for it, starting to invite Pat to come grab food with you, asking him to come over and try a new game you got, things you think might interest him. You think his friends are on your side because while at first they express enough interest in coming along as well that Pat basically can’t say no, they begin to back off once he begins saying yes on his own. You find a lot in common with the mysterious Pat Gill, a love of games and a similar sense of humor that brings back Simone’s groans from your childhood when you both get into it, and, too, the way he sometimes just goes silent and stares at something that isn’t there. Your relationship changes the night you talk about it over too many beers, the night you tell him about Laura and what she did to protect you both before and then, and he tells you that he still hears Allegra when he tries to drift and _oh_, you didn’t know, Clayton’s disability is famous but no one ever spoke of Pat’s, and it’s the first time you touch him, just gently laying your hand on his but it’s enough that he doesn’t move away.

You partner well with a lot of people, in class and outside, but they all continue to not be right for you, not like Laura, and maybe you’re chasing the impossible but you’re willing to wait. Jonah’s the one you go to the most and you’ve done a run or two with him since moving back here but even he admits that despite your compatibility you could do better. Clayton attends class with you one day and you’re as surprised as everyone else when your minds touch and you enter drift with him. Almost as soon as you recognize it you lose it, though, the mix of shock from both sides and your absolute desire that Clayton _never_ know your frankly indecent thoughts about Pat startling it away. The man himself, though, looks at you with shining eyes and dismisses the class, and this time it’s Pat who pulls you to Simone’s place after dinner instead of the other way around. You all get completely trashed that night in Clayton’s honor, and though the alcohol leads him to admit that even if he could pilot again he doesn’t want to, it’s a relief to know it’s not outside the realm of possibility. It’s the first night you see something in Pat’s eyes that your alcohol-twisted brain wants you to think is akin to the hunger that lines your skin every time he touches you, but Pat is also _very_ drunk and you’ve been on the wrong side of that one too many times. You remember it, though, and watch for it in case it happens again, preferably when you’re both at least mostly sober.

It does happen again, with increasing frequency, but you can’t tell if it’s not just because you and Pat are drinking together with increasing frequency so you continue to not make a move while growing more and more obsessed with the man. You go to his class three days a week and Pat really does seem to be trying to find you a partner - some weeks you get someone new each day and some weeks you stay with the same person for a while. Nobody makes you feel like Laura or even as good as Jonah, and that’s what you say, when Tara asks. You’ve tested compatible with more than a few girls since the time with Clayton but you don’t know them, compatibility is one thing but trust is another and how can you open your mind to and actually hit drift with these women you don’t know? You do a few runs with both Jenna and Simone who you do trust but even Tara won’t part them from each other, and you confess to them one night you’re worried about higher ups trying to force Clayton back in if you can’t find someone soon. Simone does her best to allay your fears but you saw her eyes widen when you said it, like maybe she never considered it but she heard you now and if there’s anyone you can trust to protect Clayton you know it’s Simone.

She’s started watching you, though, with a mysterious intent you can’t pin down. You catch her quickly looking away an awful lot but especially when both you and Pat are there, leaning against each other on the floor or swapping beers on the couch, you’ve learned that any casual affection between you and Pat can catch Simone’s attention like nothing else and you let it go for a few weeks before finally catching her eye multiple times in the same night and intentionally spill your gin and soda to get her to talk to you alone. She’s tipsy but not drunk, just like you, and while she helps you clean your jacket you ask what the fuck and she doesn’t answer but asks you a lot of questions about your feelings for Pat and you answer them all honestly because it’s _Simone_. You could no more lie to Simone than you ever could to Laura, and just like Laura her eyes light up as you wax lyrical on your desire to jump Pat’s bones and you’re desperate to know what her play is but she rests her hand on your wrist and asks for your trust and, you give it.

Less than two weeks later there’s an odd number of recruits and pilots in your class and you think you glimpse a flash of red up and to the side of the training room and you _get it_ so you’re unsurprised when Pat smiles at you easily and asks if you’ll spar with him today. Simone is a fucking genius and you owe her so much wine or gin or whatever she wants if this works, of course you’ll spar with Pat, did you just miss the signs of compatibility because you were distracted by your crush or have you gone stupid with age, you’re not sure but Pat lines up with you and he’s holding himself back, distracted, not going for it, his mind is closed like it probably always is while teaching but he’s not teaching you, he’s going to _drift with you dammit_, so you tease and push and smirk until you see Pat’s expression shift and, yes, you got him, let’s do this shit.

Drifting with Laura was the soft comfort of home, blankets and rain and chocolate chip cookies. Drifting with Jonah has always been full of music, lines folding together into melodies, taut strings and thrumming beats. You know exactly the moment you’re in a drift because it fills you with sensation, and drifting with Pat Gill right now is fucking _electric_. Your body is on fire, lightning crackles from your every pore and you feel this drift consume you, the stars and the moon and the entire cosmos is in your veins, and the _hunger_, oh, it’s there, it was there all along and you see a dream in Pat’s mind that snaps along your skin like ice and needles, his pain for Allegra and the maze he wandered that you set on fire with your fingertips now, burning away everything that keeps you and Pat apart as your minds devour each other. It can’t last. It lasts forever. Your life was saved so you could love Pat Gill.

The drop is as sudden as the drift was, for you, but Pat looks _soft_ for the first time you’ve ever seen sober and you’re boneless, post-orgasmic and completely drained so you stumble into Pat, trust him to hold you up. You’re vaguely aware of the entire fucking Academy celebrating around you but your focus is narrowed down to the single point of Pat’s lips and you pull him in for a kiss that fails to capture the fire of your first drift together but captures something more, the kiss is a promise and a future and the whole world is at your feet but right now your whole world is Pat grinning sheepishly and dragging you to Simone’s party before taking you to bed, and that’s, ha. That’s another story.

**Author's Note:**

> My polygon tumblr is @polyside, come find me there yelling about these ridiculous humans and also about writing being hard. Next up is either Brian/Pat at the party and after, or Simone or Jenna POV, whichever lets me finish first.


End file.
